Dance-the-music : an educational platform for the modeling, recognition and audiovisual monitoring of dance steps using spatiotemporal motion templates

In this article, a computational platform is presented, entitled “Dance-the-Music”, that can be used in a dance educational context to explore and learn the basics of dance steps. By introducing a method based on spatiotemporal motion templates, the platform facilitates to train basic step models from sequentially repeated dance figures performed by a dance teacher. Movements are captured with an optical motion capture system. The teachers’ models can be visualized from a first-person perspective to instruct students how to perform the specific dance steps in the correct manner. Moreover, recognition algorithms-based on a template matching method can determine the quality of a student’s performance in real time by means of multimodal monitoring techniques. The results of an evaluation study suggest that the Dance-the-Music is effective in helping dance students to master the basics of dance figures

Fusion of Multimodal Information in Music Content Analysis

Music is often processed through its acoustic realization. This is restrictive in the sense that music is clearly a highly multimodal concept where various types of heterogeneous information can be associated to a given piece of music (a musical score, musicians\u27 gestures, lyrics, user-generated metadata, etc.). This has recently led researchers to apprehend music through its various facets, giving rise to "multimodal music analysis" studies. This article gives a synthetic overview of methods that have been successfully employed in multimodal signal analysis. In particular, their use in music content processing is discussed in more details through five case studies that highlight different multimodal integration techniques. The case studies include an example of cross-modal correlation for music video analysis, an audiovisual drum transcription system, a description of the concept of informed source separation, a discussion of multimodal dance-scene analysis, and an example of user-interactive music analysis. In the light of these case studies, some perspectives of multimodality in music processing are finally suggested

Take the Lead: Toward a Virtual Video Dance Partner

My work focuses on taking a single person as input and predicting the intentional movement of one dance partner based on the other dance partner\u27s movement. Human pose estimation has been applied to dance and computer vision, but many existing applications focus on a single individual or multiple individuals performing. Currently there are very few works that focus specifically on dance couples combined with pose prediction. This thesis is applicable to the entertainment and gaming industry by training people to dance with a virtual dance partner. Many existing interactive or virtual dance partners require a motion capture system, multiple cameras or a robot which creates an expensive cost. This thesis does not use a motion capture system and combines OpenPose with swing dance YouTube videos to create a virtual dance partner. By taking in the current dancer\u27s moves as input, the system predicts the dance partner\u27s corresponding moves in the video frames. In order to create a virtual dance partner, datasets that contain information about the skeleton keypoints are necessary to predict a dance partner\u27s pose. There are existing dance datasets for a specific type of dance, but these datasets do not cover swing dance. Furthermore, the dance datasets that do include swing have a limited number of videos. The contribution of this thesis is a large swing dataset that contains three different types of swing dance: East Coast, Lindy Hop and West Coast. I also provide a basic framework to extend the work to create a real-time and interactive dance partner

An advanced virtual dance performance evaluator

The ever increasing availability of high speed Internet access has led to a leap in technologies that support real-time realistic interaction between humans in online virtual environments. In the context of this work, we wish to realise the vision of an online dance studio where a dance class is to be provided by an expert dance teacher and to be delivered to online students via the web. In this paper we study some of the technical issues that need to be addressed in this challenging scenario. In particular, we describe an automatic dance analysis tool that would be used to evaluate a student's performance and provide him/her with meaningful feedback to aid improvement

Communicating through motion in dance and animal groups

This study explores principles of motion based communication in animal and human group behavior. It develops models of cooperative control that involve communication through actions aimed at a shared objective. Moreover, it aims at understanding the collective motion in multi-agent models towards a desired objective which requires interaction with the environment. In conducting a formal study of these problems, first we investigate the leader-follower interaction in a dance performance. Here, the prototype model is salsa. Salsa is of interest because it is a structured interaction between a leader (usually a male dancer) and a follower (usually a female dancer). Success in a salsa performance depends on how effectively the dance partners communicate with each other using hand, arm and body motion. We construct a mathematical framework in terms of a Dance Motion Description Language (DMDL). This provides a way to specify control protocols for dance moves and to represent every performance as sequences of letters and corresponding motion signals. An enhanced form of salsa (intermediate level) is discussed in which the constraints on the motion transitions are described by simple rules suggested by topological knot theory. It is shown that the proficiency hierarchy in dance is effectively captured by proposed complexity metrics. In order to investigate the group behavior of animals that are reacting to environmental features, we have analyzed a large data set derived from 3-d video recordings of groups of Myotis velifer emerging from a cave. A detailed statistical analysis of large numbers of trajectories indicates that within certain bounds of animal diversity, there appear to be common characteristics of the animals' reactions to features in a clearly defined flight corridor near the mouth of the cave. A set of vision-based motion control primitives is proposed and shown to be effective in synthesizing bat-like flight paths near groups of obstacles. A comparison of synthesized paths and actual bat motions culled from our data set suggests that motions are not based purely on reactions to environmental features. Spatial memory and reactions to the movement of other bats may also play a role. It is argued that most bats employ a hybrid navigation strategy that combines reactions to nearby obstacles and other visual features with some combination of spatial memory and reactions to the motions of other bats

Dionysus meets neoliberalism: Zumba fitness and the call to zorbitality

In the twenty-first century, asexuality has become synonymous with sexual orientation, being described as a ‘lack’ of sexual attraction. This definition is problematic, as it assumes that everybody is sexual and that sexuality is immutable. With the rise of a postfeminist culture, the lived experiences of asexual-identified women are in danger of being lost within static narratives of frigidity and singledom. In response, this article proposes an emergent concept for reconfiguring female (a)sexualities through collective ecstatic motion – Zorbitality – drawing on the global Latin dance fitness phenomenon, Zumba Fitness, as a central example. I firstly conceptualise Zorbitality, via Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of ‘flow’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome.’ Secondly, I examine the emergence of Zumba Fitness as a contemporary Dionysian rite, mediated by digital culture, capitalism and globalisation, through my insights from the ZIN Academy and Believe party (London, July 2015) and work as a Zumba Fitness instructor. Finally, I conceptualise Zumba as (i) an asexual space, (ii) a celebration of the autoerotic body and (iii) an invocation of West African collective movement rites. Zorbitality emerges as a resistant imaginary, where differences in sexuality cease to matter and where personal movement styles are celebrated within a set of shared rhythm

Cubaneo In Latin Piano: A Parametric Approach To Gesture, Texture, And Motivic Variation

ABSTRACT CUBANEO IN LATIN PIANO: A PARAMETRIC APPROACH TO GESTURE, TEXTURE, AND MOTIVIC VARIATION COPYRIGHT Orlando Enrique Fiol 2018 Dr. Carol A. Muller Over the past century of recorded evidence, Cuban popular music has undergone great stylistic changes, especially regarding the piano tumbao. Hybridity in the Cuban/Latin context has taken place on different levels to varying extents involving instruments, genres, melody, harmony, rhythm, and musical structures. This hybridity has involved melding, fusing, borrowing, repurposing, adopting, adapting, and substituting. But quantifying and pinpointing these processes has been difficult because each variable or parameter embodies a history and a walking archive of sonic aesthetics. In an attempt to classify and quantify precise parameters involved in hybridity, this dissertation presents a paradigmatic model, organizing music into vocabularies, repertories, and abstract procedures. Cuba\u27s pianistic vocabularies are used very interactively, depending on genre, composite ensemble texture, vocal timbre, performing venue, and personal taste. These vocabularies include: melodic phrases, harmonic progressions, rhythmic cells and variation schemes to replace repetition with methodical elaboration of the piano tumbao as a main theme. These pianistic vocabularies comprise what we actually hear. Repertories, such as pre-composed songs, ensemble arrangements, and open- ended montuno and solo sections, situate and contextualize what we hear in real life musical performances. Abstract procedures are the thoughts, aesthetics, intentions, and parametric rules governing what Cuban/Latin pianists consider possible. Abstract procedures alter vocabularies by displacing, expanding, contracting, recombining, permuting, and layering them. As Cuba\u27s popular musics find homes in its musical diaspora (the United States, Latin America and Europe), Cuban pianists have sought to differentiate their craft from global salsa and Latin jazz pianists. Expanding the piano\u27s gestural/textural vocabulary beyond pre-Revolutionary traditions and performance practices, the timba piano tumbao is a powerful marker of Cuban identity and musical pride, transcending national borders and cultural boundaries